Final Fantasy and Familial Groups

Since the first anatomically modern humans were ambling about, they have moved in groups. Small family groups, larger tribes, extended family groups… you’ve all heard the trite phrase “man is a social animal” and it does happen to be true, scientifically speaking.

I’ve been watching Jess play Final Fantasy XIII and all the story lines seem to have something to do with family or a family group. One character’s mom dies. One is missing his son. Another, her sister. Due to all these unfortunate circumstances, a they have a suicidal drive to either avenge their fallen families or reunite them. It makes sense, given that the characters are human based, according to everything I’ve read in psychology and my dabbles in sociology and anthropology. It also makes sense that most people would be moved by these stories as a result, as they should have similar feelings. After all, “blood is thicker than water” and “family is forever.”

It’s like watching a movie I don’t speak the language of, so I only understand pieces. I do love my sister dearly, and while I don’t think that if I was abducted my family would leave me to die, I don’t quite understand a lot of the emotions and phrases playing out on screen. My family was never the feeling expressing sort. Feelings existed and were there, but were not spoken of. Not the more positive ones, anyway. It makes me wonder about us: Would we have been different in a different time? One with more catastrophe, like in this game? What is it about people that makes them pull together in difficult times, or long for their families? What makes them fear they’ll never see them again?

I can tell you the scientific answer, and it all has to do with genes and the fact that if a species wants to survive, its genes need to be passed on. Best way to ensure the genes pass on is to install a mechanism to force one to take care of genetic offspring and those that share your genetics, even if it is only by 50% or less. I can’t tell you the emotional answer, and that troubles me for a cold, self involved reason: It makes me a poor writer if I can’t synthesize a full range of emotions in my mental alchemy lab.

Of course, I’d be lying if I said that was all it was. You know it, I know it. I’m both fascinated and repulsed by the fact that I don’t understand what seems to be a basic knowledge that you put up with your family because they’re your family. I can vaguely understand tolerating idiotic behavior from someone with 50% of my DNA that I see often or has influence over my life. It makes things a fuck lot easier if those that see you often are happy with you, and I’m terribly socially lazy. A lot of the time it’s just easier to ignore it all than bother to fuss about it. However, when people describe relationships with those outside of the 50% range, things become puzzling. I always wonder if I’m seriously missing out because while family seems to bring a lot of headaches, it also seems to bring people a lot of joy.

As I’m watching with the fascination of someone watching an ant farm, I wonder if the reason this game was so family based is not because a lot of people are not like me, but because they are like me. The world is smaller than ever, and now it isn’t uncommon for kids to move away for jobs, to abandon the lands where their family first set down roots, and rarely see each other in person. It used to be that you were with your family all the time, working beside them, running from predators with them, protecting them, feeding them, and taking care of their children. Now, we see each other through screens and talk to each other with keyboards. Humanity isn’t all that way, but where virtual communication has become more possible, people are moving farther and farther away from their families because they can worry less about “keeping in touch” with the new tech. But what happens when your only contact with someone for years is through a screen? Would you run after them if they were cursed with a horrible disease that could infect you too, just to try to save them? Or would it be easier to just weep for them, far away from them, the problem, and having not felt them elbow you in the ribs in play or ruffle your hair for years?

Maybe that’s why this game seems to be more focused around actual blood families than the Final Fantasy games I’ve known in the past, maybe we need some type of reminder. Our playmates are taunting us from a half world away, our families are on the opposite coasts, and our friends exist on the internet.

I’m betting more people feel as unsettled and alien as I do watching this dedication to others actually being acted upon and not just paid lip service. Others that feel they’re failing the test of whatever it is to be human. With all this technology working its way farther and farther into our lives, it makes sense that we’re in danger of becoming part machine ourselves.

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3 Comments:

The questions in your essay are parts of what I humbly call my life’s work, your reflections bouncing all over the place in my head, even giving me a new image (picture?) of parts of what I’m trying to explain in my unfinished unpublished first scientific paper. If I may pretend to teach, the integration of the mammalian mind is the same across all mammals; humans use a standard mammalian model that was subjected to a unique kind of stressful environment while possessing evolved neural mechanisms that had served multiple species of apes for forty million years where the apes initially dominated in the African continent sized jungle canopy. Fortunately for us though unfortunate for the huge diversity of apes, the old world monkeys grew to dominate the jungle canopy forcing the apes to become both meaner and smarter.

That’s where we began some 6 to 8 mya. You mentioned our being a strongly social creature; this is quite correct, in fact, there is yet unexplored potential in the “magic” that can arise from talkative apes cooperating together in a task that is important to the group.

My model of the integrated mammalian mind says that a “self” is built from three layers of complex “limbic algorithms”; a first layer arising in the brain stem where the evolved mechanisms start up your conscious “self” “making” you breathe while orienting your awakening “self” by looking around your immediate environment where “mechanisms” have taken “note” of the exact positions of “important Objects/persons”; things that we keep in categories of things with significant emotional valance. You don’t think about this “wake up tool”, it executes automatically, usually leaving little to no trace on your “conscious awareness”, unless something like your wallet is now lying open with the contents strewn across a shelf. Drawers are open and as this “tool” takes in these discrepancies, your “conscious awareness” is going to experience some unique and often unpleasant, altered emotional states that will lead to strongly goal oriented types of behavior.

This “tool” is one among many that make up the evolved modular mind, where emotional tools sculpts behavior in easily discernable categories of “relatedness” that are conducive to survival in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaption (EEA). I mentioned a first layer of equations differentiated from the other two categories by how they deal with variables; things in the environment are variables, other people are complex variables that, depending on importance, can be highly modeled and structured to be a little version of that person that we can interrogate about their reactions to “whatever”; it’s another kind of tool. However, in this first layer of emotional self algorithms, other people are seldom allowed as a variable on the left side of the equation; as in, self + nonliving environmental variables + environmental situation involving self = emotion state that can be thought of as a “goal state” whose goal is to “fix” whatever is broken on the left side of the equation. These goal states are the drivers of behavior in whatever category of behavior the particular algorithm participates; the first layer are primitive, selfish, and involve many parts that drift in and out of awareness, usually operating below classic awareness.

The other two layers of algorithms that form an “integrated sense of self” have grown out of the necessary interactions between different families of feelings that have contributed to the survival of the whole in the EEA. The second layer is family connections, if there is any perceived genetic connection to an other “person”, our “feelings” about that person must be calculated by different mechanisms than when dealing with a non related other; a conspecific, to be precise. The calculations about our feelings about other persons who are genetically related is a finely tuned thing, containing both the percentages of shared genetic interest plus how important they are in the immediate affairs of your life; this is one of the things you helped me see today, how there are at least two aspects to this Second Domain Algorithm (my new nomenclature as yet unpublished). The precise importance of Mother and Father (classic model family) to the mind/self of the developing child has been a part of my thinking for years; I’m a retired pediatrician. In the earliest self of the youngest infant, I’m not sure that the infant’s self is separate from the caretakers, meaning the self must have looping interactions between the caretaker’s self back into the infants self; the integration of a human self has an obligation to bond to caretakers or the self fails to integrate correctly.

The third layer of limbic equations that calculate our feelings about everybody else besides family is a deeply puzzling thing, complex group behavior being common in mammals, from wolf packs to ground hog cities, dolphins and whales, chimps and humans; the magic of success comes from a principle called “altruism” and this has been studied in a diversity of species. It shows a delicate balance when it’s part of the Third Domain algorithms, where selfishness must be balanced against cooperation and success has been showed in multiple species to occur when altruism is the more dominate complex emotion over selfishness. These forces coupled with our need to use communication to facilitate more complex family relationships at the same time we were depending heavily on cooperation with our conspecifics, somewhere from there we got to the magic miracle that is the human brain.

That’s an introduction to what I’m saying in my paper, “Self and the Integration of the Mammalian Mind”, where I try to explain how layers of different neuro embryologic structures that grow into a human brain at birth, are connected into continuously operating loops that then grows and integrates into a functional person who takes care of themselves, their family obligations, and whatever group cooperation is necessary to ensure survival of the self in whatever environment the world and chance throw at any one of us.

My question to you now is, can you understand anything that I am talking about? I’ve had others say they didn’t understand a word I wrote and I had tried to be clear; doesn’t do much for my confidence as a budding writer and teacher who needs to “effectively communicate difficult to understand concepts to others”.

Another question I ask myself; does it seem strange that every human when confronted face to face is usually what we would call a “civilized” person yet our group organizations like government, as a whole, appear more like a retarded three year old turned loose with a loaded hand gun. I sense that there are some important things that our species has yet to perceive about itself, mirroring, if you will, our development of a self aware self; us as a self aware “species”, perhaps.

I liked your essay, the game designers have learned how to trigger evolved mechanisms of the Savannah Adapted Evolved Modular mind (SAEM mind) to enhance emotional involvement with the game experience but I wonder if they understand why things work the way they do and is everything we can do to ourselves a good idea?

BTW, you helped me see another side of something regarding the Primary Emotions and their relationship to the generation of whole complexes of cooperating layers of mental mechanisms, but to explain in depth would be impossible due to the wealth of background information that forms the foundations of my own Gestalt. I’ve been on this problem for a few years, my BS in Psych in 1979, MD in 1984, General Pediatrics training completed in 1987 followed by Board Certified status for many years after. I spent many years as a community Pediatrician plus the last 10 years of active practice I held a second job, medical director for Pediatrics in a rehabilitation hospital’s children’s ward; also why I never published yet, try working out the details of a new model for talking about the human mind when one works 60 to 80 hours a week.

Even though I retired disabled due to liver disease and arthritis, these years off have given me time to better integrate my observations into my studies that’s building into a coherent model that I hope will allow greater unity and clarity between the many disparate fields that all study the brain/mind and its manifestations across the life of our species. I hope to understand better and to be able to teach something that is useful to science as a whole. Also hope this isn’t too much for a reply to an essay…

I don’t think it’s too much of a reply at all! I think I understand what you’re saying, but let me give a quick and dirty sum up to check: The brain operates on three levels, the first that makes up the basest consciousness that all beings have, comprised of processing one’s environment and reacting to it in order to survive. The next computes reactions strictly to those that share some component of your genes, taking into account your relationship with them genetically and personally. This tends to be especially strong among parents and children due to the fact that while the child is an infant, it has no sense of self, and its self is therefore an extension of the parents until it progresses to a point in which the child realizes they are separate entities. Ergo, the child is bonded to the parents because until it was its own being, it was a part of the parents and that psychological “gestation” of the self leaves impressions on that child’s psyche that never fade, just like our parents’ genetics do on our DNA. (Random side note: I fully agree with your point about the kid being a c The kid has no sense of object permanence yet, it seems a little far fetched that they would realize they are conscious when they can’t even tell if a ball has disappeared because it is under a blanket. Both are external things, and if they cannot process their environment properly yet (that first level), it makes no sense they could process the second.) The third layer comprises our relationships to everyone else, and our socialization with those outside our familial groups is made up of a series of calculations that compares selfishness and cooperating with those that it would not directly genetically benefit us to help, and in many scenarios, altruism wins over selfish motivations. I’d argue that it is true in many, but not all scenarios due to operating off of a set of calculations that similar to the “tit for tat” game theory:

Unless provoked, the agent will always cooperate
If provoked, the agent will retaliate
The agent is quick to forgive
The agent must have a good chance of competing against the opponent more than once.

Of course this isn’t perfect, but in the EEA it would make sense that whatever causes this type of cooperation unless provoked would improve survival and therefore, be selected for and still exist to this day.

If I completely mangled all of that, I apologize! Feel free to correct me, I love knowing how the mind works and like hearing new theories. ^_^

As far as our governments and group organizations go, your description is blunt and accurate for many of them. I wonder the same thing a lot of the time. I’m not sure I have an answer, but it is an interesting question. My amateur hypothesis is that humans that exist in these situations are in an artificial environment so far removed from the original society they evolved to exist in that something else takes over. When one is surrounded by people who have some specific thing in common with you, be it vegetarianism, wealth, political stance, whatever, they start to do what society does naturally: separates into a bell curve of view points with what would be classified as “extremists” on both sides. The issue is that both extremes fight for support and with a little charisma and apathy on the part of those in the middle of the curve, terrible things can start to happen. People start dividing. They start taking more and more extreme viewpoints because while they may not agree with this extremist over here entirely, they do at least PARTIALLY agree with this one, and if things are going to shift, they want it to shift in a direction they support, even in the smallest way. It’s not perfect and I have no real evidence, but that’s my guess why governments and other groups often seem so out of touch with the people they supposedly serve.

I don’t know if the game designers knew the science behind what they’re doing any more than I know the science behind why people react so strongly to love stories and journey tales, but I’m glad they did it. It gave me something to write about, and the post I was contemplating not publishing certainly lead to interesting insights from you! 😀

Excellent, so what are emotions, what are they made of and what do they make?

Funny feelings I’m having, part of that magic I mentioned; something about humans that we brush up against with others, notice something special but have yet to grasp what we are missing. I watch it in the pro bicycling peloton where a group becomes one thing with lots of little parts. It moves like its alive and aware of itself; its mesmerizing to the riders, they love being a part of it.

I’m a teacher thinking about teaching students. I’ve taught before but I haven’t in a while. Besides my wife’s, mine is the one evolved modular mind that I have direct access; I guess I find myself an interesting enough person to pay attention to…

I found a mother load of human evolution videos and my brain is exploding, again.